Developer Blue Manchu was actually surprised by the comparisons between Void Bastards' art style and that of Ubisoft's XIII.

Inspiration can come from anywhere. In any creative medium, it isn’t uncommon for people be inspired by the work of others. The same applies to game development, as some developer can be inspired by the visuals or mechanics of another title and incorporate some unique version of them into their own title. Void Bastardsis no different as it has taken inspiration from several different titles, though Jonathan Chey revealed to DualShockers that one visual comparison to Ubisoft’s XIII surprised developer Blue Manchu.

When it comes to gameplay influences, Blue Manchu’s Jonathan Chey referenced quite a few titles including XCOM and Total War for Void Bastard’s strategy game elements and Rogue Legacy for the quirky character traits. While the visual design is said to be “Art Director Ben Lee’s unique vision” the game is going for a comic book inspired look and even took some visual cues from games like Return of the Obra Dinn and Outlaws.

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Following the game’s announcement though, several people compared the game’s art style to XIII, a stylized FPS that was released by Ubisoft Paris PC, PS2, Xbox, and GameCube all the way back in 2003. That being said, Jonathan said the team at Blue Manchu actually didn’t have that game in mind at all during the design phase, which made the frequent comparisons somewhat surprising to the team:

“The XCOM series for its standout blending of a strategic overgame with tactical action. The Total War games on that front too. Rogue Legacy has obviously been influential to a lot of games for the way each new character has interestingly different traits. Return of the Obra Dinn was a key inspiration for the art as were old sprite shooters like Outlaws. Although we’ve seen lots of comments since the release of our trailer along the lines of “looks like XIII”, weirdly, we kind of forgot about that game during development!”

DualShockers full interview with Blue Manchu’s Jonathan Chey will be going live tomorrow, so be on the lookout for that. In the meantime, you can learn about the lessons from the development of System Shock 2 and BioShock that carried over into Void Bastards and why Blue Manchu doesn’t want to call the game a roguelike.Void Bastards will launch for PC and Xbox One in Early 2019.